Global Warming: What is the Truth?

Predicting global warming due to anthropogenic or manmade pollutants spewed into the atmosphere is a pretty complicated subject. It is complicated because there is climate and there is weather. The Earth has pretty chaotic weather that impacts climate and poorly understood climate that impacts weather.

Climate is basically the average over a long period of time the temperature and/or precipitation. Weather is basically what happens during the shorter time periods. An El Nino event which is the warming of the eastern Pacific Ocean waters of more than 0.5 degrees of its normal average temperature changes weather patterns and impacts climate. La Nina the reverse of El Nino or a cooling of the eastern Pacific waters does the same. The La and El are both generally accepted as natural variations though they may be influenced by anthropogenic forcing.

Solar variations on a roughly 11 year cycle may have some influence on climate and weather. The variation in total solar energy received by the Earth tends to be small and is dismissed as insignificant by most experts. They may be right but the current solar cycle is remarkably quiet. This is one of the poorly understood but confidently dismissed inputs to our climate system. While the change in total solar irradiance seems small, prolonged reductions like the Mauder Minimum and the Dalton Minimum seem to have resulted in a significant cooling of Earth's climate. Beyond the Mauder Minimum there are few recorded observations to determine solar variations influence on climate. Longer term solar cycles (100 to 1500 years) have been postulated but there is really not enough reliable data to prove or disprove their existence.

Paleoclimatological reconstructions of past temperatures and past solar variability are also complicated. Concentrations of oxygen and carbon isotopes in sediment or ice vary due to more than just temperature and precipitation. There is a lot of noise in these reconstructions that require a standard statistical methodology to filter out the noise in a reliable and repeatable manner. If you think tree rings hold the answer ask a gardener before drinking the kool ade.

Another problem is the sensitivity of Earth's climate to a doubling of carbon dioxide concentration. While the physics of the radiative transfer of heat to and from carbon dioxide molecules is fairly simple, the sensitivity of the Earth used in climate models include estimates orders of magnitude greater than the understood physics of carbon dioxide heat transfer for other less understood feedbacks and forcings. For example the increase in cloud cover due to warming could produce ten times greater global cooling than the doubling of carbon dioxide. It is simply an unknown.

Severe weather is often attributed to global warming. The Earth has undergone many variations in weather patterns and a few appear to have cycles or oscillations that may be predictable. Others are just confusing abnormalities or are part of synchronization of multiple oscillations. We live in a chaotic climate/weather world. Right now we are in a more intense Atlantic basin hurricane cycle. This cycle is not based on general climate models but based on long term meteorological observations. Over the next thirty years or so the Atlantic basin should have more storms. Probably there will be more intense storms. Equally probable is just more storms with less intensity. That is weather, not something predictable by climate models.

The point of this article is to advise everyone to learn more before voting to spend ridiculous sums of money to fix a problem that may not exist. Reasonable investment to reduce our carbon footprint and reduce our dependency on oil is frugal. Moving to carbon neutral fuel sources is smart. Acting on fear or illiteracy is stupid.

This is the only planet we have and I think we should be good stewards. It would be better if we were smart stewards and not mindless lemmings. One more time I am linking to the Di-hydrogen Oxide ban by Penn and Teller. Don't be a lemming.